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  • Gun Control

    http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...n-control-con/
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    The Great Gun Control Con

    Gun-ban advocates don’t want you to know that gun violence is falling
    By Tom Gresham - - Wednesday, November 4, 2015

    The pendulum of politics swings widely. We see that today as candidates for the Democratic Party nomination for president clamor for more restrictions on lawful gun owners. What a change from 20 years ago, following the passage of the Clinton gun ban (also known as a ban on so-called “assault weapons”), which resulted in President Bill Clinton’s party losing control of Congress for the first time in 40 years. The president himself, in his 1995 State of the Union Address, said as much: “I don’t think it’s a secret to anybody in this room that several members of the last Congress who voted for that aren’t here tonight because they voted for it.” That gun ban expired 10 years later, and a congressionally required review showed that the law had little or no effect on crime.

    Following Al Gore’s loss in 2000, the widespread advice for Democratic candidates was to avoid gun control completely when campaigning. It was a loser, they were told. What changed to prompt Hillary Rodham Clinton to make a new TV commercial, aired last week in Iowa and New Hampshire, where she talks only about gun control?

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    Simply put, the Great Gun Control Con is running full tilt, aided by a compliant, if not complicit, media shilling a string of lies designed to reshape public knowledge on crime and guns. Is “con” too strong? Only if one “knows” that crime is up, or that “gun crime” has reached the status of an epidemic, that gun shows are somehow immune to gun laws through a loophole, or that “assault weapons” are the preferred tool of murderers. None of those, in fact, is true, but those building blocks of deceit mark the return to a standard premise of the Democrats — that reducing the number of guns results in fewer murders and less crime.

    Josh Sugarmann, founder and head of the Violence Policy a gun-ban advocacy group, recognized that the public didn’t know the difference between real military rifles that fire in full-automatic mode (machine guns) and the look-alike versions made for the civilian market that fire only one round per pull of the trigger, the same as all semi-automatic firearms made for the last century. He called these rifles “assault weapons” — a term with no definition, making it infinitely expandable — and set up the plan to use the looks, and not the functionality, to ban them.

    “The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons — anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun — can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.”

    Media lapped up the pejorative term, with CNN showing misleading video of full-automatic machine guns when discussing the 1994 ban on semi-autos. Even today if you ask someone what an “assault weapon” is, chances are she will say it is a machine gun. The latest information gleaned from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports clarifies that more people are killed with fists and feet than with all rifles, and cosmetically challenged semi-automatic rifles represent a small subset of all rifles. Simply put, this class of firearms is a minor factor in U.S. murder rate, but President Obama and Mrs. Clinton continue to call for banning the sale of this popular rifle used for hunting, competition and for personal protection.

    Mrs. Clinton’s latest TV commercial starts with her saying, “This epidemic of gun violence knows no boundaries.” A clever phrase, and a key part of the Great Gun Control Con, “epidemic of gun violence” proclaims a rapid increase in “gun violence” (as though someone robbed, raped or murdered is any less violated if some other tool is used). Never does one see a reporter jump up to challenge this basic premise. In fact, the rate of crimes with guns has declined. Not by 5 or 10 percent, but by nearly half in only 20 years. That should be cause for banner headlines. Millions more guns, millions more gun owners, but crimes committed with guns, and murders overall, are down by nearly half in only 20 years. The “epidemic of gun violence” is a myth created by those who would con the public into believing that “something must be done.” Pew Research documents that even though crime with guns has been cut in half, a majority of the public thinks that crime with guns is increasing. The con is working.

    CNN’s Sanjay Gupta jumped onto the “epidemic of gun violence” to call for a renewal of “research” to treat firearms as a virus. Congress withdrew from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) the amount of funding it was using to promote gun control through these directed research grants, finding it inappropriate at best for this health organization to use taxpayer dollars to stack the deck with junk science. At the time, the CDC director said the goal was to treat guns like cigarettes, and to ban them. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has given hundreds of millions of dollars to Johns Hopkins University, much of it directed at producing evidence favoring gun control. Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership said, “The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is one of the old established university gun control advocacy factories.” The media quotes these ginned-up studies as fact, never questioning the source or the strings for the funding.

    The famous “gun show loophole” is simply a chimera — a widely-accepted con. All laws outside a gun show apply inside a gun show. Multiple studies confirm that criminals rarely get their firearms from gun shows.

    Mrs. Clinton also calls for the repeal of the Protection of Lawful Commerce In Arms Act, which she claims prevents gun companies from being sued. In truth, the act was passed as more than 30 cities were suing gun makers in an openly announced attempt to drive them all out of business through the sheer weight of defending dozens of suits funded by taxpayers. The suits did not claim the manufacturers had made defective products or engaged in illegal activity. They sought to saddle a highly regulated industry with liability for the criminal misuse of their products by third parties. The subsequent law clearly states that gun makers and sellers can be held liable for making a defective or unsafe product, or for criminal acts, but it does protect them from politically motivated lawsuits designed to crush an entire industry. Mrs. Clinton seeks to resurrect this tort lawyer paradise and drive hundreds of American companies into bankruptcy.

    To convince the public that America needs even more than the thousands of gun control laws now on the books, baseless claims and outright lies must be repeated to the point where “everyone knows” that gun crimes are up, there is an epidemic of gun violence, that gun makers are exempt from legal liability, and that “assault weapons” are machine guns. Tell a lie enough times, using the echo chamber of an activist media, and you can convince the public that restricting the law-abiding gun owner is only “common sense.”

    • Tom Gresham hosts the nationally-syndicated radio talk show “Tom Gresham’s Gun Talk” (guntalkmedia.com).
    To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

  • #2
    I am hoping whomever the democratic front runner is will push this issue and then gets clobbered in the general election to such an extent that any other congressmen would soil themselves at the very thought of trying to pursue the insanity of even more gun control.
    Removing a single turd from the cesspool doesn't make any difference.

    Comment


    • #3
      Opinion
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      • #4
        On gun control, Fox News lets Chris Christie have it with both barrels | Mulshine
        1 / 10
        Republican presidential candidatestake the stage during the Republican presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum on Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2015, in Simi Valley, Calif. (AP Photo | Chris Carlson)
        Jonathan D. Salant | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
        Paul Mulshine | The Star Ledger By Paul Mulshine | The Star Ledger
        Follow on Twitter
        on November 26, 2015 at 7:46 AM, updated November 26, 2015 at 10:00 AM






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        It was shaping up as the usual Fox News interview of Chris Christie. Host Bret Baier was serving up softballs and watching Christie hit them out of the park.

        Then this question came out of left field:

        "Is it true that the issue of gun control inspired you to get into politics?"

        "No. That's not true. No," said the governor.

        "It's in the Star-Ledger," said Baier - who's a Jersey guy, by the way.

        Christie stuck to his guns, as the cliché goes. But his guns weren't loaded. Baier read this Christie quote from a 1993 Star-Ledger article:

        "The issue that has motivated me to get into this race is the recent attempt by certain Republican legislators to repeal New Jersey's ban on assault weapons."

        At that point Christie should have realized the game was over. In the old days – the days when newspapers were really made out of paper – a guy could get away with this sort of thing.

        MORE: Recent Paul Mulshine columns

        There's a story that Franklin D. Roosevelt, when reminded of something embarrassing he had said in Cleveland years before, asked his adviser how to handle it.

        "Deny you were ever in Cleveland," the adviser said.

        That dodge doesn't work these days.

        Nonetheless Christie prolonged the agony through two more rounds of denial that he ever took a position that was documented in more outlets than that one article.

        At that point Baier could have brought up another quote from the article: ''We already have too many firearms in our communities."

        Or he might have brought up Christie's pledge a paragraph later that he would fight any "weakening" of gun laws if elected to the state Senate.

        But Baier mercifully changed the subject to how Christie's doing in the current race.

        That took the focus off that first fiasco in his career.

        Christie never even made it to the ballot in 1993. It turned out that the 30-year-old newcomer to Mendham Township didn't know Mendham Borough was in in a different legislative district. Half the signatures on his nominating petition were thrown out.

        Two years later Christie made a run for state Assembly, still banging on the gun issue. He sent out a flyer in which he said of his opponents: "Tony Bucco and Mike Carroll want to repeal the ban on automatic assault weapons. It's dangerous. It's crazy. It's radical. They must be stopped."
        "Is it true that the issue of gun control inspired you to get into politics?"- Bret Baier
        gun fly jpeg.jpg1995 Christie for Assembly campaign

        They weren't.

        But Rick Merkt was.

        He was Christie's running mate that year in the Republican primary for two open seats.

        "We just got destroyed," he said when I called him yesterday. "I think we came in fifth and sixth."

        Merkt, who went on to win an Assembly seat two years later, recalls that at the time Christie had made a calculation that New Jersey was a liberal state and he had to take liberal positions.

        "There'd be all sorts of stuff from that era," Merkt said. "Christie was strongly pro-choice and strongly anti-gun. I guess he would say he has evolved on all these issues."

        Merkt wouldn't say that. He said Christie will take whatever position he thinks the voters demand.

        "He was very pragmatic in what he did and what he espoused and he thought you could get ahead that way," said Merkt. "And it worked for him. He wound up being governor of New Jersey."

        That would have been enough for most pols. It certainly would have been for Merkt, who in 2009 gave up his Assembly seat to run as a long shot against Christie in the GOP gubernatorial primary.

        Christie's main opponent in that campaign was the arch-conservative former Bogota Mayor Steve Lonegan. In that race, Christie previewed the stance-switching tactics he's employing in this race.

        When Lonegan proposed ending property-tax rebates, for example, Christie sent out a flyer attacking him. Once safely in office, Christie canceled the rebates. He then brought them back only for low-income households.

        When Lonegan and Merkt proposed clearing house on the state Supreme Court bench, Christie joined in the pledge – and then reappointed Jon Corzine's chief justice.

        Christie's been pulling the old switcheroo often in this race, changing his stands on issues like ethanol as he goes from corn-state Iowa to "Live Free or Die" state New Hampshire.

        But nobody's paying much attention. That sort of thing will only get a guy so far – and at the moment so far is eighth place in the RealClearPolitics average of polls at a mere 3 percent.

        If he ever starts rising in the polls, his critics could find plenty of other things Christie said in the past that could come back to haunt him.

        For example, I could swear I heard him say once that he wanted to be governor of New Jersey.

        But I'll have to check the clips on that one.

        BELOW: Go to the nine-minute mark for the exchange on guns:
        http://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/...ie_have_i.html
        To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

        Comment


        • #5
          WH: Americans Should Talk About Gun Control 'Around the Thanksgiving Table'
          By Susan Jones | November 24, 2015 | 8:44 AM EST
          (AP File Photo)

          (CNSNews.com) - Instead of voting to "encumber and bog down the refugee process," Republicans should go along with a Democrat demand to bar people on a secret government list from buying guns, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Monday.

          Earnest said the Republican plan to beef up the vetting of refugees will not improve national security: "Again, if Congress were actually interested in doing that, they'd pass a law that would prevent somebody who's on the terror watch list from being able to buy a gun. That's what Congress should do.

          "And as people are sitting around the Thanksgiving table, talking about these issues, as they should, and as I'm sure they will all across the country, I hope that's a question that will be raised, and asked by members around the table--that if we're going to have a serious discussion in this country about national security, let's talk about some pretty obvious things that Congress can do.

          "And one obvious thing that Congress can do is pass a law that prevents somebody who is on the terror watch list from--from being able to buy a weapon. That -- that -- there's no reason -- I'm not sure why that's even controversial. I'm not sure why it hasn't been done so far.

          "I suspect, however, that it has a lot to do with the fear that Republicans have of the NRA."

          It also has a lot to do with a general distrust of secret government lists: Remember, even the late Sen. Ted Kennedy ended up on a terrorist watchlist in 2004 -- and he's not the only American to be surprised by their inclusion on a secret government list of "known or suspected" terrorists.

          On the other hand, the man who tried to detonate an underwear bomb on a U.S.-bound airplane on December 25, 2009, was not on the list -- even though the government had been warned about him.

          That's the problem: It's not always clear why people are nominated for inclusion on the terrorist watchlist or if their name is ever removed from it. Just having the same name as a terror suspect apparently can land a person on the list.

          Earlier this year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) introduced a bill called the "Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2015." The bill would give the Justice Department the authority to prevent a "known or suspected" terrorist from buying firearms or explosives.

          The National Rifle Association doesn't oppose denying terrorists firearms, but a spokesman told the Associated Press the group wants to ensure that Americans who are wrongly included in the list are afforded their constitutional right to due process.

          The Terrorist Screening Center, administered by the FBI, maintains the overall list of known or suspected terrorists. The names in that huge database are then made available to agenies that screen people for possible terror threats.

          For example, subsets of the terrorist watchlist are used by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to screen individuals before they board an aircraft; by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to inspect or vet individuals traveling to and from the United States, and by the Department of State (State) to screen visa applicants.

          The list is long: A 2009 Justice Department audit found that as of December 31, 2008, the consolidated terrorist watchlist contained more than 1.1 million known or suspected terrorist identities.

          Three years later, a 2012 report from the Government Accountability Office found that after the attempted attack by the underwear bomber in 2009, "nominating agencies have expressed concerns about the increasing volumes of information and related challenges in processing this information."

          The 2012 report also noted that the attempted plane-bombing in 2009 "resulted in more individuals in the (terrorist screening database) being denied boarding flights, being deemed inadmissible to enter the United States, and having their U.S. visas revoked, among other things."

          But, the report added, "such screening or vetting and related actions have also had impacts on agency resources and the traveling public, including "more individuals misidentified as the subject of a (terrorism) record, which can cause traveler delays and other inconveniences."

          The report found that no single government entity is routinely assessing "how U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents are being affected by screening or the overall levels of misidentifications that are occurring."
          http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/...tting-around-0
          To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

          Comment


          • #6
            Gun-ban advocates don’t want you to know that gun violence is falling
            I am sure that that is a great source of comfort to folks who have been affected by gun violence.
            "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" ~ Epicurus

            Comment


            • #7
              It's not a question of "comfort." It's a question of whether we should infringe on the rights of private citizens.

              I should amend this. I am a Republican which means I believe there actually IS a right to own firearms.

              The left-leaning Supreme Court justices disagree that there is any right to own guns at all, so they would disagree with my first statement.
              Last edited by GVChamp; 30 Nov 15,, 20:20.
              "The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood"-Otto Von Bismarck

              Comment


              • #8
                Secret government list with no due process or way to clear your name... yeah thats a good idea.

                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by GVChamp View Post
                  It's not a question of "comfort." It's a question of whether we should infringe on the rights of private citizens.

                  I should amend this. I am a Republican which means I believe there actually IS a right to own firearms.

                  The left-leaning Supreme Court justices disagree that there is any right to own guns at all, so they would disagree with my first statement.

                  Well, I am a Democrat and I also believe there is a right to own guns.

                  But I also believe there is right for the government to also provide a reasonable regulation of the firearms.

                  Where the friction point is what is reasonable?
                  “Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
                  Mark Twain

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Originally posted by GVChamp View Post
                    It's not a question of "comfort." It's a question of whether we should infringe on the rights of private citizens.
                    Pl. tell that to the person who wrote the article or to the one who posted it
                    "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" ~ Epicurus

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Originally posted by GVChamp View Post
                      It's not a question of "comfort." It's a question of whether we should infringe on the rights of private citizens.

                      I should amend this. I am a Republican which means I believe there actually IS a right to own firearms.

                      The left-leaning Supreme Court justices disagree that there is any right to own guns at all, so they would disagree with my first statement.
                      Here is a question? As part of a democratic society, do you believe that citizens have a right to vote?
                      "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" ~ Epicurus

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        Originally posted by antimony View Post
                        Here is a question? As part of a democratic society, do you believe that citizens have a right to vote?
                        To a point. The question of rights is that it cannot be voted out.
                        Chimo

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          Originally posted by antimony View Post
                          Here is a question? As part of a democratic society, do you believe that citizens have a right to vote?
                          Actually we live in a Republic where we have a right to vote but not a right to vote when it infringes on our Bill of Rights.

                          I've posted this quote before but it seems relevant whenever gun control is debated:

                          "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            Gun control in the UK has been a great success in as much as all the licensed gun owners have lost the majority of guns they can own legally ,, however the criminal fraternity have no problems getting their bony oily fingers on them , in one way a success ,,the other a non compliance exercise , no change there then , which pisses me off as a man who wants to defend his family / home etc has to resort to the base ball bat ,,a one sided argument which the legal / lawful citizen will lose . .
                            Last edited by tankie; 01 Dec 15,, 20:56.

                            Comment


                            • #15
                              Originally posted by tankie View Post
                              Gun control in the UK has been a great success in as much as all the licensed gun owners have lost the majority of guns they can own legally ,, however the criminal fraternity have no problems getting their bony oily fingers on them , in one way a success ,,the other a non compliance exercise , no change there then , which pisses me off as a man who wants to defend his family / home etc has to resort to the base ball bat ,,a one sided argument which the legal / lawful citizen will lose . .
                              I was talking to my host in York last month (we rented a room via Airbnb) about gun control. He was shocked that I own "many" guns. I said gun regulation only works on law abiding citizens. Criminals by definition do not obey laws. He said criminals in UK do.

                              I rolled my eyes.

                              He did agree with me that many people in the US live far away from effective law enforcement and cannot rely on the government. He also agreed that sometimes when he takes his family to vacation in a rural area, he feels a bit vulnerable.
                              Last edited by gunnut; 02 Dec 15,, 01:09.
                              "Only Nixon can go to China." -- Old Vulcan proverb.

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